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The surreal fact in the human tragedy in Dallas is that the sniper who murdered five police officers was not killed by another officer, but by a mechanical robot. This conjures science fiction images of killer robots deployed against man. It's not altogether reassuring. Technically, of course, the actual killing officer was not the robot, but the man operating the robot. The human element was very much in play, detonating an explosive carried by the robot. Sci-fi buffs might draw disturbing analogies to movies such as "Robocop," the popular 1987 film set in a near-future dystopian world in which a...

It is the worst of times — well no, not really. This past week we had shootings of police and shootings by police. The world economy and political situation is a mess. It is a time of crisis — without an apparent Churchill, Thatcher or Reagan. Yet, in many ways, things have never been better. In 1930, 304 American police officers were killed in the line of duty; last year it was 122. In 1930, the U.S. population was a little over one third of what it is today, so, on a population adjusted basis, there were about seven times...

 Are the Luddites staging a comeback? In the early 1900s, it was the British weavers and textile workers in the early 1900s, who destroyed machinery to protest newly developed manufacturing machinery they feared would rob them of their livelihoods. Recently, there appears to be a growing chorus of voices sounding the alarm on automation stealing all of our jobs to those invoking doomsday prophecies of a Hollywood-style "Rise of the Machines" taking over our world as we know it. This begs the question of whether we're seeing a resurgence of Luddite sentiments.Critics of automation are quick to cite a...

Robin Chase and Martin Ford explain why at a White House roundtable. Automation is going to make universal basic income a necessity sooner rather than later, a White House panel discussed today. Technology entrepreneur and Zipcar founder Robin Chase and author Martin Ford (Rise of the Robots) today during a Facebook Live discussion with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. “We need to start thinking about universal basic income,” Chase said, referring to the concept of a base-level of income each person would get just for being alive. “If people had that platform, that basic minimum, we could be...

A robot escaped from a testing area in Perm, a city not far from the Urals, and made it on to a busy junction, baffling passersby, but also disturbing traffic. “The robot was learning automatic movement algorithms on the testing ground, these functions will feature in the latest version of the Promobot.” The co-founder of the robot’s maker, Oleg Kivokurtsev, told ura.ru news agency. “Our engineer drove onto the testing ground and forgot to close the gates. So the robot escaped and went on his little adventure.” Kivokurtsev explained.

A new estimate says that robots will perform more than half of all jobs by 2045, leaving the frightening prospect that millions of once solidly middle-class people will be left idle and jobless. [snip] So: Is this it for human labor? Hardly. Since the Industrial Revolution, jeremiads about the end of human labor have been sounded with great frequency. They’ve never come true.

...“Had horses had an opportunity to vote and join the Republican or Democratic Party,” Leontief wrote, they might have been able to get “the necessary appropriation from Congress.”... ...what happens if the job market stops doing the job of providing a living wage for hundreds of millions of people? How will the economy spread money around... ...if the bottom quarter of the population in the United States and Europe simply couldn’t find a job at a wage that could cover the cost of basic staples? What if smart-learning machines took out lawyers and bankers? Or even, God forbid, journalists and...

As we reach the middle of the 21st century, half the population of the world will lose their job to a machine. The latest comes from Moshe Vardi, professor at Rice University , Houston, who delivered a talk to the American Association for the Advancement of Science , exploring the question: "If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?" Vardi reckons that half of workers across the globe will be replaced by machines within the next 30 years, wiping out middle-class jobs and "exacerbating inequality". He noted that robots would take over...

South Korean auto giant Hyundai Motor Group has unveiled a wearable robot that can be applied in many areas including military and production lines, the company announced on Friday. "This wearable robot that we are developing for commercial purposes will be used in diverse areas," a company official said. ... The wearable robot under development is known to help the controller by enhancing overall physical strength, making it possible to lift an object weighing over 60 kg and assist him or her walk and go up stairs. It can be used in assisting people with disabilities and the elderly to...

Robot Waiters Fired for Incompetence in China Customers liked them, but they couldn't carry soup. Adam Toobin April 6, 2016 The world may not be ready for restaurant robots — yet. At least two restaurants in Guangzhou, China have fired their teams of artificially intelligent robot waiters after discovering the machines were unable to keep up with their human staff. “The robots weren’t able to carry soup or other food steady and they would frequently break down. The boss has decided never to use them again,” an employee at one of the restaurants told the Worker’s Daily. The humanoid bots...

China’s uptake of industrial robots is set to rise rapidly in the coming years as higher labour costs and the heightened aspirations of workers push manufacturers to embrace automation. The development may add to fears that workers in poorer countries are most in danger of being displaced by automation, with analysis by Citi and the Oxford Martin School, a research and policy unit of the UK university, published earlier this year suggesting that more than 75 per cent of jobs in China are at a “high risk” of computerisation. Mirae Asset Management, an Asia-focused house with $75bn of assets, predicts...

Google owned Schaft unveils new bipedal robot at NEST2016 in Tokyo.

The Pentagon’s No. 2 civilian official said Wednesday that the Defense Department is concerned that adversary nations could empower advanced weapons systems to act on their own, noting that while the United States will not give them the authority to kill autonomously, other countries might. Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work said the Pentagon hasn’t “fully figured out” the issue of autonomous machines, but continues to examine it. The U.S. military has built a force that relies heavily on the decision-making skills of its troops, but “authoritarian regimes” may find weapons that can act independently more attractive because doing so...

Twitter trolls made a dummy out of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence chat robot, which learns through public interaction, by turning it into a pro-Nazi racist within a day of its launch. Tay, the artificial intelligence (AI) robot, had a bug in which it would at first repeat racist comments, then it began to incorporate the language in its own tweets. ...The robot, made to sound like a teenage girl, targeted 18- to 24-year-olds, “the dominant users of mobile social chat services” in the United States, the page says.... Soon after, Tay was tweeting, “Hitler was right I hate the jews” and...

What happens when one of the world’s biggest software companies lets an artificially intelligent chatbot learn from people on Twitter? Exactly what you think will happen. Microsoft’s Technology and Research and Bing teams launched a project on Wednesday with Twitter, Canada’s Kik messenger and GroupMe: a chatbot called Tay that was built using natural language processing so that it could appear to understand the context and content of a conversation with a user. Targeting the 18-to-24-age demographic, its aims were simple: “Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful...

What happens when one of the world’s biggest software companies lets an artificially intelligent chatbot learn from people on Twitter? Exactly what you think will happen. Microsoft’s Technology and Research and Bing teams launched a new project on Wednesday with Twitter, Canada’s Kik messenger and GroupMe: A chatbot called Tay that was built using natural language processing so that it could appear to understand the context and content of a conversation with a user. Aimed at the 18-24 demographic, its aims were simple: “Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual...

Video (2:16) at link. This robot has the most realistic facial expressions I've yet seen. Just imagine this technology in 20 years.

Dr. David Hanson leads the engineers and designers that created Sophia, the team's most advanced android to date. Sophia's lifelike skin is made from patented silicon and she can emulate more than 62 facial expressions. Cameras inside her "eyes," combined with computer algorithms, enable her to "see," follow faces and appear to make eye contact and recognize individuals.

As minimum wages across the country rise and restaurants face increased labor costs, one fast food CEO is thinking about replacing human workers with robots. Carl's Jr. head honcho Andy Puzder wants to open a new restaurant concept that's "employee-free," reports Business Insider. Puzder was inspired by a visit to Eatsa, the futuristic San Francisco-born restaurant where patrons order via tablet and retrieve their food from automated cubbies. He believes the idea of a restaurant free of social interaction could be especially appealing to millennials, noting that young people seem particularly fond of ordering from kiosks over humans.

When it comes robots, humans can be a little too trusting. In a series of experiments at Georgia Tech that simulated a building fire, people ignored the emergency exits and followed instructions from a robot -- even though they'd been told it might be faulty. The study involved a group of 42 volunteers who were asked to follow a "guidance robot" through an office to a conference room.They weren't told the true nature of the test. The robot sometimes led participants to the wrong room, where it did a couple of circles before exiting. Sometimes the robot stopped moving and...